Using A@H for a Small VoIP Provider

[keefe007]

Does anyone on here use A@H for a small voip provider? My clients have been begging me to provide VoIP to them and I just found a great carrier to provide DIDs and PSTN termination for me. What I'm wondering is what are the best practices for using A@H for a small voip provider. I plan to only have 10-20 clients on this to start, maybe up to 100 later.

Another question I have is should everyone get their own extension number or should I use their DID as an extension number?

[AlexanderBell]

Use SIP, not IAX2, and most of the load is taken off your server. Send us a writeup once you get it working. We'd love to publish it on Nerd Vittles.

[mberlant]

I am a small VoIP provider and I use vanilla Asterisk for my configurations. I do this so that I can provision my clients with "natural dialing" Dial Plans, not requiring the user to dial 9 (or 0, depending upon their country) to get an outside line, allowing them to dial local numbers with 6, 7 or 8 digits, etc. This has led to my settling upon the convention of assigning an extension number to each user. In my systems, all extension numbers begin with 10xx and all service codes begin with 11xx, since these codes do not conflict with any dialing pattern anywhere in the world I do business.

If you use each person's DID as his/her extension number you will bump into two limitations (which may or may not bother you). First, a caller in one part of your system will need to dial the entire DID number to reach another of your users. Second, you will either have to significantly complicate your Dial Plan to pick these numbers out in order to route them via Asterisk or leave them alone and force user-to-user calls to travel via your VoIP service provider.

The bottom line, though, is that it is up to you to weigh these criteria in favor of the balance that suits you best.